Monday December 8th Roundup

It’s Monday again, and the snow is not falling on the trees; largely because the city just cut down all the trees to ease the rebuilding of Granville street. Oh, and the rain.

This week we have some cool news about custom built online ads targeted at user behaviors, Google and whether it’s a monopoly, the release of MySQL5.1, and a load of design tips. Enjoy.

Internet Marketing and SEO

First up in our Internet Marketing category comes from The New York Times. They discuss a web marketing effort to find out what attracts a click. The article discusses a couple of advertisers building automated systems for conversion testing and ad creation which generate customized advertisements on the fly based on data given either from on-page items and behavioral targeting, or from metrics pre-gathered by the clients. Really a must read for anyone into conversion testing.

The last of our SEO stories for the week is perhaps the biggest, an interview from The AM Law Daily with Sanford Litvack (previously) of Hogan & Hartson. Litvack was to be lead counsel for a government monopoly case against Google following the Google/Yahoo agreement that never never materialized. He claims that the monopoly case is why that agreement was never finalized.

A cross-topic post and an issue that I have always felt strongly about: why usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. A succinct and effective article (though the article itself ignores several of the usability guidelines it mentions), though still fairly base level. This one is great for all you one man design/development “teams” out there.